The invention relates to an instrument holder for a surgical instrument, comprising a shank equipped with a head designed to receive an instrument, and an annular locking component mounted so as to slide about the shank, under the head, equipped with locking means which cooperate with the head so as to lock the instrument on the head, and pushed against the head by a helical spring.
An instrument holder of this type is known in particular from U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,658,290 and 5,236,433, the contents of which are incorporated herein by reference.
A surgical instrument, for example for preparing for the fitting of a hip prosthesis, works in a medium which causes considerable soiling of the instrument and the instrument holder. Moreover, a surgical instrument holder must be cleaned very frequently and very carefully in order to avoid any risk of infection. However, cleaning of surgical instruments is difficult, in particular the cleaning of the space between the shank and the locking component on account of the presence of bone debris and coagulated blood.
Still further, tools designed to meet the requirements of manual control in which sufficient tactile feedback is essentially the only instrument control design criteria are often not adequate when applied to modern surgical procedures, such as Computer Assisted Orthopedic Surgery (CAOS) that requires greater precision in order to enable fixed position sensors to transmit accurate position information. CAOS requires attachment (and detachment) of devices that hold or locate IR detectable markers.
What is needed therefore is an instrument holder that facilitates calibration of CAOS systems by the reproducible repositioning with each attachment and after cleaning. Further, what is needed is an instrument holder that is simple to disassemble for cleaning without special tools, and which precisely controls the position of the held instrument in order to enable position sensors to transmit position information accurate enough to enable remote, computer assisted orthopedic surgical procedures.